Cloanto's Personal Paint 7 Breaks Amiga Chip RAM Barrier

With the release of the new CPU blitting module just made available on
Aminet (biz/cloan/PBlit_68K.lha),
Personal Paint 7 becomes the first Amiga program to actively exploit the full
functionality of both the Graphics library and the Amiga blitter applied to
bitmaps stored in Fast RAM.

Normally, two crucial parts of the Amiga system require bitmap data to be
stored in Chip RAM: the original (Agnus) blitter chip, and the Graphics library.
Personal Paint uses both, which until now meant that it had to store in Chip RAM
at least the bitmaps currently being manipulated. Thanks to its modular design,
Personal Paint 7 already implemented a "virtual blitter" which optionally uses
the CPU instead of the Agnus chip. The module just released extends this
capability by implementing a faster, emulated 32-bit blitter (the Amiga blitter works in
16 bits).

The complete detachment from Chip RAM became possible when the developers of
the famous CyberGraphX system completed the replacement of 100% of the original
Amiga graphics.library with corresponding functions that can work on Fast RAM.
This code is implemented in CyberGraphX version 40.100 and higher, which has
just been released. After many sleepless nights of Cloanto's programmers, in
cooperation with the CyberGraphX team, Personal Paint 7 becomes the first Amiga
software to automatically detect and exploit this condition. To use this
feature, users have to install the new CPU blitting library and the CyberGraphX
software v. 40.100 or higher, and turn off "Settings/Graphics/Amiga Blitter" in
Personal Paint.

We would like to take this opportunity to praise the developers of
CyberGraphX for achieving this difficult objective. CyberGraphX "clones", like
earlier versions of the original CyberGraphX (and the original Amiga libraries),
still require bitmaps to be in Chip RAM in order to be processed by certain
functions of the Graphics library. (Personal Paint 7 is not "confused" by
CyberGraphX clones that do not provide equivalent capabilities.)

The efforts of the CyberGraphX and Cloanto programmers have finally made a
dream come true for many Amiga users who had plenty of Fast RAM but never enough
Chip RAM.